LEAF taxi driver lets €13,000 savings do all the talkin’

When Dublin taxi driver Paul Clooney told his work colleagues that he was going to ditch his then favourite car brand after twenty years and make the switch to a Nissan LEAF EV he was greeted with the same response - ‘you’ll never make it work’.

As a taxi driver working 12 hour days, driving up to 2,000 kilometres during working weeks and an average of 70,000 kilometres a year, Paul was not surprised when his fellow drivers at Gala Cabs in Lucan challenged him on the wisdom of buying a 100% electric vehicle for use as a taxi.

“A lot of taxi drivers said to me that I’d never make it work, but I’d done my homework. It’s been a superb investment for me. Over the year the car will save me around €13,000 between fuel and service costs,” said Paul, who is now one of the world’s most influential Nissan LEAF drivers.

“I check the stats and world ranking on the Nissan LEAF app which is connected to the car and how you drive. I’m regularly ranked in the top 10 or top three. I’m in the top 0.1% in the world ECO rankings for distance travelled, regenerative braking and energy consumption which is calculated daily, weekly monthly and yearly.”

“Last month I generated 413 kWh through regenerative braking. The car battery is 40kWh so that’s over ten batteries that I’m fully charging each month just by using the brake in the car. I’m getting 250 kilometres average and close to 300 kilometres on one charge, depending on how I drive.”

Paul was first attracted to the LEAF by the €10,800 in Government grants that are currently available to SPSV drivers who make the switch to a new EV and by the potential to wipe out both the €8,000 to €10,000 he was spending on diesel and €4,000 he was spending on car servicing each year.

“Anyone who buys a new EV as a taxi gets €10,800 in grants, including the €3,800 SEAI grant and an additional €7,000 through the eSPSV Grant Scheme once it passes as a taxi. You also get €600 towards the cost of installing a home-charger and the added bonus is that all public charging is free.”

Paul likes to work twelve hour days for ten months of the year so that he can enjoy two months off with his wife and three kids each summer when the family fly out to their apartment in Fuerteventura, Spain.

“My average fuel bill when I was driving diesel was €200 per week. If you charge on the street that bill disappears. I serviced my old car seven times last year which cost me €4,000, that’s gone too. This is how I’m getting to my figure of €13,000 savings a year - and that includes the two months of the year that I’m not on the road.”

“ePedal is one of the best things about the car. Being able to accelerate, brake and stop with one pedal makes driving around the city easier, but it also saves on servicing. You’re not on the brakes as much and the battery is your motor, so servicing is really only about changing the brake fluid and pollen filters.”

“Driving with ePedal is a more relaxed way of driving, especially in Dublin where the pace or speed at which you move is dictated by traffic congestion. It’s very intuitive and once you start using it you start to wonder why every car is not like that.”

Paul is based on the taxi rank at Liffey Valley Shopping Centre and starts his 12 hour shift at 3.30 a.m. each working day.

“I set out each day from home with the car fully charged and stick to the ‘ABC’ rule during the day – “Always Be Connected’. I top up regularly throughout the day and have a few regular spots where I can fast-charge, so I’ve no issues with range and I’ve never had a problem finding a charger.”

“I top up for the first time around 8.30 a.m. or 9 a.m. and if I get a job to the airport I’ll use the charger there. There are a few other places I use regularly in Lucan, Park West and Stillorgan, so the car never drops below 20% or 30% charge and I can add as much if I charge during the time it takes me to grab a coffee or sandwich.”

“I usually get home with between 40% and 70% charge, depending on jobs, so it’s just a matter of plugging it into the home charger. It takes four hours to fully charge at home and 30 to 40 minutes to charge to 80% with the fast-chargers on the ESB network.”

“I’ve driven 25,808 kilometres in four months, almost 7,000 kilometres a month. My stats tell me that I’ve saved or reduced carbon emissions by 3,742kgs for that distance. That’s nearly four tonnes. I’ll never buy another petrol or diesel car. EVs are the future and in five to ten years we’ll all be driving them.”

Nissan LEAF a ‘no brainer’ for business says new ‘EV-angelist’

As a successful businessman Brendan O’Sullivan (47) clearly has a great nose for a deal and an even sharper eye on how to manage costs as he travels to client meetings the length and breadth of the country.

His thriving software development business is based in Bray, where he also lives with his wife Mairín, and hardly a day passes where he is not travelling at least 100 kilometres to meet and service the needs of a growing customer base.

Making the switch to the fully electric Nissan LEAF was a ‘no brainer’ for Brendan who describes himself as an ‘evangelist for EV driving’ having experienced the savings and thrills of zero emissions driving.

“I was driving an Audi A3 convertible. My brother had the old model LEAF and was always saying how great it was. Myself and Mairín are very environmentally conscious and the VW emissions scandal really ticked me off so I began to look at what we could do to help protect our environment.”

“We live in Bray and the business in based here too. The majority of my driving is M50 based from Bray to client sites via the M50 and I would go down the country once a month on average. Traffic was an unavoidable part of my day and I was especially mindful of my carbon footprint.”

While his decision to buy the Nissan LEAF was environmentally motivated, Brendan was also influenced by the removal of BIK on electric vehicles, the potential to reduce his car running costs and by an abundance of free public charging points in Bray.

“We are completely spoiled in Bray. There’s fast chargers where I shop and where I walk the dog. We’re set up to charge at home but only use the home charger 10% of the time. The rest of the time we charge around town it’s so convenient.”

“Access to charging points wasn’t a deciding factor in buying the car. I don’t even think about it or plan it. I usually park where a charging point exists and I’m in constant top-up mode. I don’t think the car battery has ever gone below 40%.”

“I’ve done 5,000 kilometres in the LEAF so far and I didn’t pay more than €30 for that, which is phenomenal. I was paying between €160 and €200 a month to fill up the Audi. That’s €2,400 over year, so the savings are too big to ignore. It is one reason why I bought the car.”

“I am all for evangelising as much as I can. The best way to convince people to switch to driving a LEAF is to show them the savings. The way I’d put it to people is simple – why do you want to spend that money on petrol and diesel when you can drive electric for almost nothing. It’s a no-brainer”.

“I’m quite smug about it on Facebook. I have a giddy thing about saying I travelled my first 3,000 kilometres in the car and it only cost me a tenner. People ask how it’s possible and I explain that the public charging points are free.”

“The thing about the LEAF is that you are being environmentally friendly to a much larger degree, but at the end of the day you cannot argue against the money it saves. You might as we say ‘here, take this car, it’s going to put €2,500 into your pocket a year.”

As a busy businessman Brendan needs to be certain that his LEAF can take him where he needs to go when he needs to get there. Range was something he was curious about before he bought the car, but he explains that it is no longer an issue.

“The maximum range I got on a full charge was 260 kilometres driving pretty hard. If was driving about town, stopping and starting, I would be confident of getting 330 kilometres but I’m driving at 120kph on the M50 or the motorway. I drive as I normally drive and I don’t hold back.”

“I would say that 100 kilometres is the most I do in any one day driving to meetings via the M50. I go down the county once a month on average and I go to Waterford and Tipperary quite a bit. I usually go down the whole way, charge overnight and get another 260 kilometres driving pretty hard.”

Those long trips up and down the country have also been made easy by the state of art technology in the car.

“I’m a technologist by nature, that is my job. What’s in the car is fantastic for what you’re paying. When I got the demo I thought that ePedal and ProPILOT were gimmicks but once you start using them you realise how handy it is and it is very, very handy.”

“I use ePedal and ProPILOT the whole time. The car’s intelligent behaviour, how it monitors traffic, how ePedal handles driving in traffic by constantly adjusting speed and braking with one pedal is fabulous. The tech is way ahead of what I’ve experienced before.”

An EV-angelist he may be but Brendan has one small complaint.

“The biggest gripe I had – and it was probably the great summer that brought it home – was that it’s not a convertible. I’ll never go back to petrol or diesel, but I’m certainly open to buying the first convertible LEAF!”.

Nissan LEAF hits all the right notes for busy grandparents

With eight grandchildren under the age of seven, Stephen and Catherine Yeo appreciate the value of quiet time to themselves but the one place they never expected to find it was in their new Nissan LEAF.

The fully electric car is so quiet that is has enabled the couple to soothe grandchildren to sleep, to ease travel sickness and to enjoy all of the dynamics of classical music for the first time while driving.

The latter was an unexpected bonus for Stephen who taught music at the College of Music in Dublin and as the headmaster of a specialist music school in the U.K. before the couple relocated to Ireland earlier this year to begin a new life in retirement.

“Our LEAF is stunningly quiet. Music has been my life and I still do music examinations. We like to have classical music on when we are driving along. It is simply amazing to listen to it with no noise. It’s the first time we have been able to hear the full range while driving,” he said

“Classical music tends to have a wider range of what we call music dynamics, which is either very soft or very loud. When you are on the motorway driving along you lose the subtlety. The soft bit tends to go very quiet and then you turn it up because you can’t hear it and three minutes later you are deafened in your ear. The great thing about the LEAF is that there is no real road noise and we can hear the whole range.”

The couple were attracted to the 100% EV for a variety of reasons. They wanted a smaller car that could still do longer journeys, but they also wanted a zero emissions car so that they could lead by example when it came to educating their grandchildren about the value of protecting the environment.

“We looked at hybrid but decided to go the full monty, so to speak. The government grants towards the cost of buying the car and installing the home charger, cheaper road tolls and the fact that you can charge the car for free outside of home made it an easy decision,” said Stephen.

“One of our grandchildren used to call our previous car the ‘Papa Mobile’ when he was younger. He’s five years old now and he has already rechristened this one ‘Granny’s Electo-Mobile.”

The couple have recently welcomed their eighth grandchild to the family and divide their time visiting their son and his family of four children in Dunshaughlin in county Meath and travelling back to the U.K. where their three other children and four other grandkids reside.

“We commute between Dundrum and Dunshauglin and we also taken the car to the U.K. travelling to York and south-east England. We’ve been surprised by how quick and responsive it is. We’ve put quite a few miles on the clock since we bought it in August and it has cost little or nothing to drive”.

“I’m not one for charging along the motorway or the M50 at 120kph. I tend to go along at around 80kph and I’m getting 220kms to 240kms out of it without ever letting the battery go lower than 10% or 15%. If I have to make a long journey then I would not start out with less than 30% or 40%,” said Stephen.

“People talk about range but who drives 600kms in a day. The distance between chargers is no more than you will ever want to drive without stopping anyway, so as long as you work out where to stop it is absolutely no problem on a long journey.”

Stephen and Catherine’s frequent trips to Dunshaughlin and to the U.K. have led them to experience the many different ways of charging their LEAF.

“We have a rapid charger at home and I set the timer on the car so that it charges when the cheaper night rate tariff comes on at 12 a.m.. We’ve used the three-pin ‘granny charger’ in the U.K.. We just plugged it in in the evening and it was fully charged by morning and we have also used the rapid chargers when we’re out shopping.”

“You have to balance things when you’ve got kids in the car but it’s down to simple planning really. There is certainty in charging at home but we have been pleasantly surprised by how easy it has been to charge the car when we’re out and about, and that subject is what freaks most people out.”

The couple have also been impressed by the ePedal technology which enables them to accelerate, brake and come to a complete stop with one pedal and by how easy it is to park the car in multi-story car parks and busy city centre locations.

“We’ve been surprised at how quick the acceleration has been. It is incredibly smooth and you do not get any surge when you change gears or brake. Anyone who has driven an automatic will not be thrown by it. It is better than the automatic car we had for the last decade”.

“We wanted a smaller car that could do longer journeys. Our LEAF is a great compromise. It’s small enough to let you park easily and to nip around Dublin but big enough to take on longer journeys, including trips out with our grandkids. It’s easy to charge and costs pretty much nothing to drive. It’s absolutely brilliant.”

Our Nissan LEAF is saving our family €2,500 each year

The numbers never lie and this is something that software developer Aleksei Jusev knows all too well when he turns on his iPad to display the Excel spreadsheet that he has rigorously maintained since the day that he collected his new Nissan LEAF.

“I did 10,000 kilometres in the car in the first two months. That cost us €100 in electricity, or 1 cent for every 10 kilometres. If I drove the same distance in my old petrol car we would have had to fill it up 12 times. That would have cost us €840,” he explains with the swipe of a finger.

“We used to have a seven-seater Peugeot 5008. It cost €70 per week to fill it up . That’s €300 a month, although we kept to €210, sometimes €250 and only did about 600 kilometres or less each month. We were restricted by fuel costs.”

“Our first ESB bill after we bought our LEAF was only €100 more than usual, which covers two months. We are saving around €200 a month in fuel costs minimum. That’s nearly €2,500 in savings over one year and we don’t have to restrict our mileage - we have more freedom to travel.”

That freedom of being able to jump into their new EV and to take off whenever they please has made an enormous difference to the quality of life that Aleksei (29) enjoys with his wife Tatjana and their two young children Evelyn (7) and Alex (3).

“My parents, brother, grandmother and cousins all live in Dublin and we live 70 kilometres away in Athy. The LEAF is so cheap to run that we can just jump into the car and pay them a surprise visit. It keeps us connected to our family and our kids get to spend more time with their cousins.”

“Some days we would do over 200 kilometres and generally we do in and around 900 kilometres each week. We have the freedom to go to places now with our kids to enjoy a day out and we are not restricted by the cost of days out or eating out thanks to the money we are saving on fuel costs. The car has freed up disposal income.”

Aleksei generally charges the family’s LEAF at home having installed a 7kWh home charger but is no stranger to plugging in the three pin ‘granny cable’ when he needs to top up the battery on visits to family and friends.

“I never worry about range because I know what the car can do and that it will cover me. When it drops to about 30% or 40% I plug it in for a few hours and that will get me through another day.”

“I did 260 kilometres on one charge driving from Kildare to Dublin including driving around the city, to Blanchardstown, out to the Airport and back home. Most of my driving was at motorway speeds and I had 9% left in the battery when I got home .”

“Charging the car is a really simple process. My usual routine is to plug it into the home charger but I have used the granny cable to top it up at my parent’s home and also used the rapid chargers when I needed them.”

“The car has given us more freedom to travel and we have taken it to Cork. We knew we’d only need one charge to get us there. We were 70 kilometres from Cork when we got our first charge and that was enough for us to reach where we were going without any problems.”

“I use the car to find charging stations if I’m going to a location I have not been before. I use the timer to charge, not always to 100% but 90%. I worked it out at home and I will get 15% for about one hour on slow charge.”

The car has also proven to be a hit with their young children who love how quickly it accelerates or “rockets”, while Tatjana enjoys how quiet the car is, especially when they are travelling as a family at motorway speeds. Aleksei, though, is much more impressed with the on board technology.

“Driving with ePedal is awesome. It was one of the reasons why I bought the car. I never drove automatic before and I wanted to have the same experience with one pedal for accelerating and braking. I was nervous using it at first but I got used to it very quickly and I’m not using the brake pedal at all now, even when parking. I can control everything with ePedal.”

“I work as a software developer so I have a big interest in tech. ProPILOT is real intelligent driving. It does everything for you. The car picks up blind spots, keeps you in lane and applies the emergency brake if you need it. It’s very reassuring and it makes driving more comfortable.”

With 12,500 kilometres currently on the clock of his new Nissan LEAF, Aleksei is close to his first service and while his mileage is excessive for little under three months, he points out that he is making even more savings when it comes car servicing.

“We pre-paid for our first three services which only cost €270. That is very cheap. Before we were paying €150 for one service, the next was €300 and then €150 for the one after. That was €600 and we’ve cut that in half which is another saving of €300.”

“I estimate that we will save at least €5,000 over the next two years by driving EV. That’s a lot of disposal income for our family. The other bonus is that we are not restricted anymore. We can go anywhere we want, at any time. We will never go back to petrol or diesel. We love our Nissan LEAF.”